Signs of Life

On climate fiction, or clifi:

Perhaps the underlying message is that you’re supposed to entertain the reader, but more and more, I greet the question with a weary smile-grimace that reveals the skull of me that’s likely to be buried in the ground sometime in the next twenty to thirty years. The search for hope is hopeless or beside the point. Fiction can’t save us in this particular way, although it can pretend to, but if in a book a heroine survives climate crisis, this has no corresponding nexus or loci in the real world, no matter how strong the will of the reader that it be otherwise. [i]

This is one of the foremost anglophone clifi authors working today, whose work is both consistently influenced by climate crisis and who has achieved a pinnacle of literary fame, Jeff Vandermeer. As a fan of his work, I was extremely excited to read this polemic of his, published just over two years ago in Esquire. In it he traces the lineage of the term clifi and sketches its relationship to speculative fiction, expresses his thoughts and opinions on his own works and other key clifi texts of the past half century, and he critiques Amitav Ghosh, so he really doesn’t leave much to ask for.

         As a scholar who works on econarratology and science fiction in particular, my attention was captured by Vandermeer’s auteurist perspective on this issue in literature, in genre fiction, in the publishing industry, and ultimately in terms of policy and lifestyle. Econarratology and unnatural narratology have offered some really interesting thoughts on how people engage with narratives, from the cultural, the material, to the cognitive turn from the work of Erin James on Postcolonial Econarratology to Jan Alber on unnartual narratology. And while various genres have their theorists and practitioners, it is those of us working in and around clifi that feel a mounting pressure to make the stories do something. Nobody that works on detective fiction is expected to prevent murders.

         But as Vandermeer points out, stories don’t work that way. So here I want to offer some remarks on climate narrative more generally that pushes against the archaic idealism of calls for clifi to provide a solution for the technical issues that surround us in the form hope.

         I offer that a self-consciously fictional genre cannot provide a framework for change. This is because there are all sorts of narratives that work in various ways to influence power structures, politics, and policy, and clifi must be multiply mediated through various metadiscourses to access these power structures, to become political and turn into policy. This transformation relies on methods of narrative dissemination and various registers of affective engagement. Clifi can, over time, provide a conduit for transforming empirical circumstances to artistic representations and finally to ideology, something that can provide a framework of common sense that can interface with the political and economic institutions that can actually avert climate disaster. Maybe.

         Here I identify four types of climate narrative:

         I want to begin with what most people likely think of when they think of clifi, especially in its speculative mode, that is, the dystopia, or as I prefer to think about it, the failed utopia. My example here is the TV series based on The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Obviously, this hellscape is no utopia for June Osbourne, but it may be for the various commanders, their wives, and so on. The TV series makes more of the climate catastrophe that haunts Atwood’s novels as we see inside the colonies. Peter Hajdu also points out that “As a cautionary tale, the 1985 novel chiefly warned about the dangers of an ideological climate and a toxic environment metaphorically, but today both that novel and its sequels solicit readings that focus on the literal toxicity of the environment which, lacking a prompt reaction, can bring about answers rather similar to what Gilead did.” [ii]

         Another register of clifi that is neither utopian nor dystopian, so I refer to Vandermeer’s fiction as simply Topian, that is, the narrative takes place in a world where the climate presents challenges to characters through an uncanny flux in literary space and time, or chronotope as narratology might have it. His Southern Reach series revolves around Area X, a place of mystery and danger located in the Florida swamps that evokes the Zone of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s Stalker at the same time as it references the uncanniness and ambient danger of American wetlands.

         Another way of articulating climate catastrophe is through utopian literature proper, and here I want to offer Everything for Everyone, an Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. This book, from an indie press and written in the form of an oral history, adheres to the traditional Jamesonian formula for a utopia: essentially a how-to manual, according to Gabriel Burrow.[iii] The book is way outside the mainstream      With that, I want to transition to the fourth type of climate narrative I wish to investigate, the empirical. First, emergent climate narratives are those that arise from media discourse about climate events: storms, floods, and other catastrophes, but also the technological, legislative, and cultural developments around climate. While each piece of the puzzle is self-contained to some degree, emergent climate narratives cohere with one another to become grist for the mills of other narratives, including the three I list above. The other side of this empirical continuum is the institutional. These are narratives, real or imagined, that are adopted by governments, industries, NGOs, and cultural milieus. As an example, I present Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii’s work on Japanese narratives around CCS technology. The viability of CCS as a means of solving global warming caused by carbon emissions is famously dubious, and although there is strong evidence that Japan, in particular, is not employing CCS technology at anything near a rate that could positively impact climate, the official narrative in Japanese government and industry is one of techno optimisim and techno nationalism. These metadiscourses unite in the story of CCS’s potential to mitigate climate change with the fantasy of leaving the fossil fuel industry intact, uniting environmentalists and capitalists in the myth of a technological curative granted to a uniquely industrious people.[iv]

         This narrative is indispensable to these institutions precisely because the technology is not working – clifi that is doing some actual lifting. How this works is partially disclosed by Saskia Brill in their article A story of its own: creating singular gift commodities for voluntary carbon markets.[v] Here, Brill points out the peculiar economic form taken by Carbon Credits, which function all at once as commodities, singular items, and autonomous gifts. A crucial aspect of carbon credits is that, contrary to how the characteristic of the commodity form is its neutrality in regards to origin of the product, carbon credits rely upon a certain morality or ethical imperative to grant them value in the first place. It’s almost a rhetorical form of labor that the credits must have access to for their value to be valorized.

         To try and understand this process, the move from emergent to institutional climate narrative and the role in this move played by clifi as a self-consciously fictional genre, I want to stand clifi on its head a bit and disambiguate the metadiscourse of climate narrative writ large. As we’ve seen from Brill’s work on Carbon Credits, and as we see in many facets of the carbon capture economy that perpetuates a fiction – that market interventions can attenuate the worst excesses of fossil capitalism – the stories around these technologies, products, etc. are in some sense real fictions; carbon credits pretend to value in ways that are very similar to Marx’s own ideas of “fictitious capital,” that is, debt, in volume III of Capital.[vi]      

These more technical interpretations of Marx’s key texts coincide with some interesting philosophy that links materialism with the affective and political, and remember that according to Deleuze and Guattari, the arts create percepts and affects.[vii] Jason Read is one philosopher who uses pop culture to demonstrate the link between Marx and Spinoza to understand counterintuitive political phenomena. Read’s work fleshes out a theory of ideology that accounts for the often-self-destructive actions by individuals and institutions. One of Read’s favorite interlocutors, Yves Citton, makes a number of compelling contributions here in terms of the interface of the personal and political vis a vis desire, the importance of the attention economy to late capitalism, and the constitution of ideology through an assemblage of narratives that are at least heterogenous, and often contradictory in his work Mythocratie.[viii] This process of narrative bricolage is a general notion that guides more specific processes outlined above, particularly the case study of Japanese narratives around CCS technology, which harnesses the passions involved in techno optimism and nationalism in such a way as to subvert the obvious contradiction between the CCS’s reality and the institutional narrative of its potential to unfetter a mode of production that is fueled by oil and coal.

         To conclude, Jeff Vandermeer is correct when he claims that clifi cannot and will not save us. Far from a gesture of false humility in acknowledgement of his own centrality in the genre, Vandermeer is pointing to the constructed nature of the subgenre and its subtle and nuanced connections to our climate reality. As Citton points out, there is a metalepsis inherent to narrative that demands we situate ourselves inside and outside the narrative at once, and this metalepsis is all the more pronounced within the framework of self-conscious genre fiction and non-fictional narratives that nevertheless fail to correspond to reality. Emergent narratives about climate, employment, global markets, etc. assail us via social media, curated by predatory algorithms. This becomes the grist for the mill of cultural production, providing the foundations for – and limits to – the imaginary of clifi authors. And while hope itself can never solve a problem of this magnitude, over time narratives of many types are assimilated to ideological persuasions and even adopted by institutions, which can then become essential to legislation, market innovations, and similar interventions that have a chance at saving our skins.[ix]

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[i] “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us,” Esquire, April 19, 2023, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43541988/climate-fiction-wont-save-us/.

[ii] Hajdu, 305.

[iii] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007); Gabriel Burrow, “The Low Bar: Crisis and Utopia in M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022),” n.d.

[iv] Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii, “Selling Stories of Techno-Optimism? The Role of Narratives on Discursive Construction of Carbon Capture and Storage in the Japanese Media,” Energy Research & Social Science 31 (September 2017): 50–59, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.010.

[v] Saskia Brill, “A Story of Its Own: Creating Singular Gift-Commodities for Voluntary Carbon Markets,” Journal of Cultural Economy 14, no. 3 (May 4, 2021): 332–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1864448.

[vi] Karl Marx, Ben Fowkes, and David Fernbach, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, V. 1: Penguin Classics (London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981).

[vii] Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, European Perspectives (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Pr, 1994).

[viii] Yves Citton, Mythocratie: storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2010).

[ix] “The Handmaid’s Tale,” SVOD, The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2025 2017); M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022); Annihilation, SVOD, Science Fiction (Netflix, 2018); Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, First Edition, Southern Reach Trilogy 1 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

The new installment in the Alien franchise is pretty good. Spoilers begin….. NOW.

There were good things (proper vibes, look, and sound, characters/performances throughout), there were bad things (resurrected Ian Holme) and a few fucking weird things (why are we getting another xenomorph baby thing? Isn’t this too close to the end of Resurrection, albeit pulled off with way more panache?). This permutation takes the thematics of the preceding films and brings them to the opposite pole from where they began, that is, the interplay between the body, parentage, progeny, and technology.

The first three films foreground the relationship between Ripley and the xenomorph as that of mother/daughter, although whom fills which role oscillates. Suffice it to say that theorists working after Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed have gotten plenty of mileage off of the first two or three films via the application of a sort of feminist/Lacanian sensibility that characterizes the horrific stakes and provides the uncanny backdrop for the conflict between the monster and Sigourney Weaver. These are not the only kinship relations, either. From Holme’s Ash onward the synthetic person is thrown into the mix, operating as a parental figure to the “perfect organism,” demonstrating a sort of cold alienation at the difference of having been manufactured rather than born, and culminating in Michael Fassbender’s David, who becomes frustrated in his role of synthetic son to Peter Weyland and tries to compensate by parenting the bioweapon of the Engineers to its own sort of perfection.

The failure of the family is constant throughout – Ripley outlives her daughter while in hypersleep, her make-shift family from Aliens is killed between the end of that film and Alien 3, and she resists the call to motherhood, even hardening herself to Lance Henriksen’s pleas as she swan dives into molten lead (do we need to talk about Alien: Resurrection? I guess I’ll just say that the term “failure” is relevant to the film in several ways, some of which have to do with the relations of kinship portrayed therein). The Prometheus/Covenant arc features a shift from motherhood to fatherhood and brings the figure of the son into the cold fluorescent light. David overcompensates for his insecurity as a synthetic being by engineering the xenomorph that we have come to know and love. But Prometheus also has a subplot where Elizabeth and her husband suffer from infertility, a detail that lays the groundwork for her horrifying “pregnancy” later on.

Given that this franchise is predicated on different relations of kinship and practices of reproduction, it is shockingly non-sexual in its content. While there is tension of a sexual nature between some characters some of the time, it is not often romantic (or in the case of the relationship between Ripley and Hicks, the relationship is essentially only romantic as they play the chaste action heroes/parents of their daughter, Newt, and their pet, Bishop). Alien offers a glimpse of sexuality in the form of voyeurism, when Ripley undresses into her famous tiny tshirt and low-rise underwear before the final fight against the xenomorph, a move that offers both the prurience of the peeping Tom and the aesthetic contrast between the hard, black carapace of the xenomorph and Ripley’s vulnerable, pale flesh. Aliens adheres to the Reaganite sensibility of ultraviolence and childish notions of sexuality, offering a surrogate family in lieu of sexual desire. The sex in Alien 3 is interesting in that it is either in the form of the threat of sexual violence or it is instigated by a Ripley whose head is shaved and who is unknowingly carrying around a xenomorph queen in her chest cavity, challenging the tropes around desire, sex, and reproduction. And while there is some sexual congress between Elizabeth and her husband in Prometheus, this is again grounded in the desire for a family rather than lust.

Cue Romulus. First, these actors are young. While previous installments saw main characters that were adults with established careers, some even entering middle age, the Romulus cast represent people who are just shedding the trappings of teenhood: ties of kinship are severed through mortality on the mining colony above which most of the film takes place, another character’s pregnancy is seen as a shock, and even more shocking once we find out the father, and so on. These characters are about to come of age and are doing so in part by fleeing their indentured servitude to W-Y. The most telling bit here about this immaturity and the ambivalence with which it is treated comes from a bit of fan service at the end, when Rain prepares for hibernation, stripping down to a version of Ripley’s suggestive attire, but without the suggestion, featuring a looser top and shorts and reminding the viewer of standard PJs rather than the near-nudity of Ripley’s outfit. There is something to unpack here about the fact that the plot and the thematics of this permutation’s register of horror are so implicated in pregnancy and reproduction. It reflects a cultural moment that is very preoccupied with sexuality, consent, and reproductive rights. The film wants to gesture at sex with a wink and a nudge by featuring a pregnancy that was conceived, as far as anyone can tell, with a similar array of gestures. It wants to remind us that we spied on Ripley at the same time that the xenomorph was stowing away on the escape pod, evoking the situation but denying the “scopic pleasure” of the voyeur by insisting on Rain’s childishness/youth/innocence and giving her the authority to cover her body. The pregnancy plot, particularly its outcome, has everything to do with connecting reproduction and indentured servitude in a post-Roe America, of course, drawing an explicit parallel between the lot of the workers and the fate of the mother/child dyad in the narrative. The young escapees are mangled by the xenomorph in trying to escape the slavery which is foisted on them, within a manufactured legality on the mining colony in much the same way that the technology of the Engineers corrupts the pregnancy that Kay seems intent to keep from not only W-Y’s claws but even the father of the child, promising a new era of sunshine and freedom to the fetus and entrusting Rain with helping her to realize it.

Finally, I don’t want to give a false impression. I’m not saying that this movie in particular should have been different. This is, however, an especially sexless time in film and TV and the horror genre doesn’t function as well when the terror lacks a complement in its opposite – and implied – affect in lust. An even better example that could be its own post (or book) would be the latest Evil Dead, which continued a series that was always predicated on the sexual tension of young adults going away to a cabin in the woods with an installment that was almost entirely devoid of sexual undertones, a move that makes the film a suffer fest and gives us as an audience, if not less clarity, then a different type of clarity around the stakes of the narrative. It does, however, demonstrate something about how we handle issues of family, reproduction, autonomy, and desire in contemporary media.

I just had the pleasure of reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea and Tusks of Extinction. Both were extremely interesting and accessible examples of cli-fi/sci-fi and I’m excited for more long-form work from Nayler, who is uniquely able to deliver narratives that engage nonhuman characters and issues of interspecies communication and embodiment as affective issues, but without and triteness or saccharine prose.

I started with Tusks of Extinction, a super quick read. While it deals with climate catastrophe, especially mass extinction, it uses this background to shed light on the anguish, powerlessness, grief, and ultimately, anger that many of us feel as our planet smolders and catches fire. On one hand, the story is wracked with grief, with the melancholy and fearful genetically resurrected mammoths via the hybrid consciousness of Damira. Damira herself struggles with her identity, and through this struggle, she bridges the narrative gap between a human narrating voice and the embodied presence of the megafauna. On the other hand, Nayler refuses to wallow in melancholy or the powerlessness of one actor in the midst of an economy that sees value in ivory only when it’s divorced from the head that birthed it. Plenty of the story are scenes of righteous anger, as Damira and co. stomp poachers into a fine paste on the taiga. A longer analysis of the novella could include some thoughts on embodied narration via Spinoza, that is, the Spinoza of the first books of the Ethics, refuting the separation of mind and body on the grounds that they are coextensive, and demonstrating how Nayler courts this sensibility in Damira, who begins her life as a human, becomes a disembodied digital copy of her consciousness which survives her organic body by two centuries, and is finally uploaded into the body of a genetically engineered mammoth. We get a taste of her new modes of sensation and perception, but there is still enough opacity to rub against the flattening narrative short-circuit of anthropomorphization. I’m also thinking, of course, of the economics of resurrecting creatures as depicted in Nayler’s future nature preserve: how does this work with work like that of Borg and Policano, or Melinda Cooper? Is this a narrative that threatens the sacred status of the nonprofit, which are typically bulletproof, at least in terms of public opinion, when it comes to negative publicity regarding the flow of money, IP, and the autonomy of those functioning within their various zones of influence?

The corporate stuff is easier, so the inroad to The Mountain in the Sea is at least more familiar. DIANIMA, a rich portmanteau, purchases some islands to research a smart octopus. We add to this narrative formula a variety of sovereign entities, including religious foundations that stretch across national borders, autonomous trade zones, and traditional national/political organizations. While our main character is human, she cohabitates with a humanoid robot and a cybernetically enhanced security officer, who commands a fleet of attack drones from a tank of fluid kilometers away from the battle. Oh, and there are octopi that use symbolic language. The novel provides an interesting puzzle (unsolveable until we are given enough info at the same time as milestones in the mystery are revealed, but there is the temptation to outthink the characters) in the nature of octopod cultural production under late-stage capitalism, environmental devastation, and the communicative lacunae that both animal and human confront in the relationship of scientist and subject.

I recently finished Debbie Urbanksi’s spankin’ new After World. It was a wildly ambivalent experience in the best possible way. Caution: spoilers ahead.

Urbanski is writing as an AI writing as a person, and the schtick works pretty well: human sounding except when it isn’t, a rival intelligence keeping us aware of when the AI starts to veer off into the too-human, and a self-awareness about the artifice of narrating. The AI eventually falls in love with its subject, one of the last survivors of human extinction. This extinction was brought on by the same AI (different branch, though) that is logging the story as a solution to anthropogenic climate destruction.

What was so ambivalent about the book was its supposed attitude toward humanity. Initially, we see the world through the eyes of a disaffected teen and her mothers, both of whom are environmentalists. The impression is of a contrite humanity that is reluctantly reaping what it has sown after exterminating so many species. This isn’t the case for everyone of course, and in the periphery of the story, there is chaos, violence, defiance, and despair. So I’m reading the book and having a more extreme version of the agonizing that is typical of certain varieties of environmentalism – a mixture of Malthusianism, zero-sum apocalypticism, masochism… you get the idea. We get what we deserve because humans have no choice, as a species, but to shit where they eat, as if we are so much yeast in a vat of grapes, consuming the sugar and shitting alcohol until we drown in our own waste. To be honest, it started to feel a bit draining. I get it, and I don’t entirely disagree. But the novel also never engaged alternative modes of distribution of resources that would be more equitable, or production that is linked to need rather than markets that would be more sustainable, or a more careful attitude toward technological innovation that would at least think twice before filling the world with forever chemicals, plastics, etc.

This final criticism is something that never gets resolved, for me anyhow. But what I find compelling is related to a really insightful op-ed in the New York Times by Tyler Austin Harper that argues in favor of the legitimacy of our species, against existential panic, and toward a real attitude of circumspection about such existential threats as climate change and AI (the two main technological themes, or nova, of After World). One thing that I kept thinking of was the relationship between the sensibility of this AI that decides, unilaterally, to end humanity with a secretly engineered and released virus, and the defeatism of most quarters of the environmentalism movement. At first glance, one might be tempted to believe that this superior digital intelligence simply ran the numbers and found exactly one solution that would save the planet for the remaining species, but it becomes clear that the minds that created this superior intelligence imbued it with the same guilt-laden, impotent attitude that has, in my opinion, contributed greatly to environmental disaster. This is because people who worry about environmental collapse are often either snared in the trap of individual choices, trying to paper-straw their way out of the apocalypse (I want to add here that having personal ethics is important, and I’m not saying people should do whatever they want, just that individual efforts at consuming less cannot possibly offset institutional levels of waste), or they attack environmental destruction head-on, as if Dupont is just going to stop making glyphosate because “it’s wrong” or whatever (for more on this, Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion is a great read, as is Borg and Policante’s Mutant Ecologies). Naturally, the AI born of this sensibility figures that capitalist greed is baked into the cake of the species and therefore the baby must be thrown out with the bathwater, to mix metaphors.

By the end of the novel, though, we see that one worldview implies its opposite. While the AI at the heart of the narration sterilizes humankind and ultimately causes its demise, it simultaneously wants to document something of humanity’s presence on the Earth, and there is the promise of Maia, an alternative digital reality where human consciousnesses will be migrated once their physical bodies are dead. The tiny sliver of this massive intelligence that is tasked with recording Sen’s life becomes fixated on Sen as an object of desire. The most moving part of the novel, for me, was that (despite the often saccharine prose, something that made me also think of This is How You Lose the Time War) the storyworker intelligence makes the same mistake as many lovers do: inserting herself into Sen’s life regardless of Sen’s needs, trying to be the center of her world to the detriment of others in Sen’s life (or their ghosts), denial of reality in favor of a more perfect fantasy.

Ultimately, the novel reaffirms the dignity and beauty of the human, but it does so by swinging far in the opposite direction, that is, making decentralization of the human a radical and suicidal proposition and instead doubling down on the singular beauty of the human (or a human). After all, Maia is depicted as a promise, but it is unclear if it is fulfilled as the novel ends with an experimental tour de force that interrogates the power of storytelling to change reality (it doesn’t, and for more, I love this assertive article by Jeff Vandermeer on what cli-fi does and doesn’t do).

What I think I appreciate most about this novel, in all its originality, is its power to remind us of the dual dead-ends of climate defeatism and fetishizing the human as such. I do not know if this is intentional or what Debbie Urbanski thinks, but after the ethical whiplash of the book’s narrative arc wore off, I returned to thinking about my posthumanist favs, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, in the context of reimagining alternative kinships and ethics of care. I also am reminded that this brand of posthumanism is completely at odds with capitalism, by definition of both the logic of capital and the requirements of ecological kinship structures. I also find myself impressed by a method of narration that is promising in subverting simple anthropomorphism in the context of a narrating nonhuman that makes tries, and at times fails, to sound like a person.

Aside from Resurrection and those insipid Alien v. Predator flicks, the prequels to Alien find themselves on the margin, critically and according to fandom. This is sad, for a number of reasons, but not beyond understanding: why does the crew of the Prometheus travel in a shiny future spacecraft while the crew of the Nostromo putters through deep space in a tin can full of exposed PVC pipes (not close enough in style, btw, to buy Scott’s own explanation, that the Prometheus was a luxury vessel, and if you want to know why then watch the scenes where Dallas and Ripley chat with Mother….)? The films drag, or leave holes in the plot, and there should have been another film to link Covenant with the original. I actually think that the reason why these films, and Resurrection, are held at an arm’s length is because the xenomorphs (neomorphs, whatever) are soft, fleshy…. squishy. When I sit down to watch an Alien film, I want chitinous, HR Geiger-inspired bugs with needle-shaped teeth, not these freshly-peeled escapees from a shrimp cocktail platter or the gelatinous blob that absorbs Ripley in Rez.

I say that this marginalization is unfortunate — flaws notwithstanding –because the films contribute some of the most interesting depictions of the commodification and engineering of life of any SF film in recent memory. These ideas contrast with and complement the original premise of the first three films, encapsulated in the infamous Special Order 937 — “Priority one
Insure return of organism for analysis.
All other considerations secondary.
Crew expendable.“

At the start of Prometheus, though, we don’t even have a xenomorph. There isn’t even a proper iteration of the “perfect organism” by the time David embarks as the insane captain of a ship full of sleeping colonists, with just a few xenomorph embryos to continue his depraved experiments. But David is incredibly interesting as a manifestation of our own latent fears about biotech, especially as it becomes ever-more clear that not only are we, as regular people, driving the bus when it comes to these technologies that routinely violate borders, protocols, quarantines, and common sense. It may be that, at a certain point, no one is driving the bus at all.

In these films, the “no one” at the wheel gets a name: David, a synthetic person created by the quixotic Andrew Weyland as a surrogate heir and companion to aid him in his journey to 1) find the Engineers, who created humans in their likeness and 2) ask them nicely, in their own language, to please make him immortal. Prometheus finds David doing just what one might expect a really fast computer to do while everyone else is asleep for several years: play basketball, watch Lawrence of Arabia on repeat, spy on the sleeping crew members’ dreams, and delve into historical linguistics to reconstruct a Proto-Proto-Indoeuropean that simply must be (and it is) the language of the Engineers. When he discovers the rough draft of the xenomorph sitting in some oily concrete amphorae, he doesn’t hesitate to start experimenting on the crew right away, rekindling the Engineers’ program to develop an organism so aggressive that it can violate the laws of thermodynamics – it grows to its full size after like, two meals. This leads to one of my all-time favorite SF climaxes: Weyland and David wake a hibernating Engineer, David starts to make small-talk, and without a pause the Engineer rips off David’s head and beats Weyland to death with it. It’s a perfect depiction of what any of use would do if we woke up to a couple of rats squealing at us from our bedside table; smash now, ask questions later. So much for David’s philology skills…

The next film finds David oscillating between a castaway and a mad scientist on the Engineers’ home planet. He has killed his beloved Shaw and destroyed all animal life on the planet after releasing the xenomorph chemical/spores/stuff onto the populace, turning the world into a massive petri dish. He plays a long game with this crew, trying to earn their trust, particularly Walter, their own emotionally hobbled synthetic person, who is also played by Michael Fassbinder. Bad guy wins, really scary ending, and a pretty cool series of action sequences leading up to it.

I’m not typically in the habit of simply labeling the concerns of popular culture artifacts for a few reasons. First, what’s the fun in decoding a text just to re-encode it in a different register? Second, how does one reconcile the tension between sociohistorical and political concerns at the time of the production and that of the time of the consumption of a given text? What may have been produced in the shadow of the atom bomb might today evoke anxieties of global contagion or desertification, and I think that both of these readings are sanctioned because it isn’t what we fear but how we talk about it that matters to me. I say all of this because I actually do want to discuss what is being talked about here, mainly because the how and what are entangled pretty uniquely in the character of David.

David is a synthetic person. He was created by an insane trillionaire for a moon-shot voyage to find our makers. In the process, he became the creator of his own organism, the xenomorph. It is subtle, but David isn’t necessarily evil, at least in terms of his intentions. After all, he is a synthetic being and therefore not beholden to morality, ethics, etc. in the same way that authentic humans are thought to be, and his being is based on a much longer timescale and a mind that is based (presumably) on algorithms more than affects. He does, indeed, seem to regret that experimenting on Shaw was necessary to realize his role as creator, to inherit what Weyland promised him in his act of creation, so to speak. What I mean is, he is doing these evil things not for the pleasure of causing pain, nor is he working for some “greater good” that would justify these sacrifices. He simply intellectualizes them as “sacrifices” devoid of meaning. There are no costs, simply steps on a path of R&D.

This is because David works in the context of zoe, the tendency for life to continuously self-propagate. For him, in his timescale and ontological condition, life is eternal and hardly differentiated. The xenomorph promises nothing less than the “perfect organism,” but also nothing more. It is unimportant what it is “perfect” for in the same way that it is unimportant why one would try and improve their painting technique or ability to play the piano. Andreas Malm makes the interesting claim that, according to the later Marx, productive forces do not determine the relations of production in society. In other words, it wasn’t the steam engine that created Talyorism or moved peasants from the countryside or began the long descent into degradation and ecological disaster, not by itself. Rather, the relations of production are found within the productive forces. Neither precedes the other, but this recursive relationship is constitutive of industrial and social “progress,” and this is what makes David such a compelling figure. He is a manifestation of this recursive assemblage himself, occupying and responding only to what Marx has called (thanks, Søren Mau!) the mute compulsion of Capital to grow, compete, consolidate, and remove obstacles.

Years after the end of Covenant, Ripley will find herself at the wrong end of this mute compulsion over and over again as Special Order 937 tries to remove what Marx knew was the weak link in automated (or biotechnological) labor: the laborer.